I’m going to present you with a thought experiment. It may cause some discomfort in any readers of an egalitarian bent, but then, that’s the point, isn’t it? We know that as recently as 30 000 years ago, we were not the only type of hominid who walked the face of this planet. There were the Neanderthals, who were not as dissimilar to us as is commonly thought, but still had several important differences, particularly behaviourally speaking. There were also the mysterious Denisovans, whom we know primarily from DNA evidence.

We interbred with these hominids frequently, and their traces remain in our DNA to this day. We aren’t sure exactly what wiped them out, but they could have simply been absorbed into our genome through interbreeding.

So my thought experiment is as follows. Let’s say the many worlds interpretation is correct, and that in one of the innumerable universes in existence, Neanderthals and Denisovans survived all the way to the present day. I know this is somewhat implausible, but bear with me. How would they be treated in our modern world? Unfortunately, there are some aspects of their behaviour lost to us. We can’t exactly administer IQ tests to them, after all. But from what we can ascertain, we know that in the case of Neanderthals, they had technology that was somewhat less advanced than ours, and that they buried their dead. We can guess all day about how we interacted with them at the time, but I think I can speculate somewhat on how they would be treated in the modern west. You might have already come up with some answers of your own.

“They’d obviously be treated differently” you may say. “They looked totally different.” Well, there are certainly different groups of Homo sapiens that look very different, and yet we are still propagandised into thinking that they are identical in every way that matters. “Well, they would have acted differently” – sure, but different groups of Homo sapiens act differently as well. If Neanderthals existed in the modern west, is it really that much of a stretch to imagine egalitarian third worldists saying that the differences in behaviour between our two species were “socially constructed” by a “system of global human supremacy?”

You may say that Neanderthals are a different species from us, but remember that we were inter-fertile with them, and seemingly interbred quite frequently as well. The bushmen of the Kalahari desert have been separated from the rest of humanity for over 100 000 years, and yet they still interbreed with other groups. Granted, they aren’t a different species, but they are obviously very different from, say, Europeans, even just in terms of appearance, let alone behaviour.

So, my egalitarian reader, think about this honestly. Would you be a Neanderthal rights activist? We are all one Genus, the Homo Genus, after all.